I finally got around to trying the Yakuza 4 demo on the Japanese PSN. For some reason I liked it a lot better than what I've seen of Yakuza 3 so far, even though the gameplay is basically identical. I think it's mainly just the way the story was set up (though it was just a demo, of course, so it was only a small piece of the puzzle).

But this has kind of convinced me that I ought to pick up Yakuza 3 if only to increase the odds of actually seeing Yakuza 4 on the other side of the pacific sometime...

Skip the demo, it's worthless. The demo only shows the battle system, which frankly hasn't aged well and is probably the weakest part of these game. Yakuza games are about story, atmosphere, and exploring a city filled with loads of minigames. The demo contains none of those things.

The really weird thing (to me, anyway) is that there was a really nice demo of this game on the Japanese PSN when it was coming out over there. I have no idea why Sega decided not to just translate that demo and instead made a new and completely inferior demo...